Note: While Affordable accepts Rent Assist, I personally am opposed to mandating its acceptance. Proposals like this reenforces the falsehood that people who need Rent Assistance and not receiving it due to landlords not accepting the program. This would make one believe that hundreds of eligible families are suffering because no one would accept their voucher. The truth is the waiting list is due to the County not providing enough vouchers to meet the demand.

This is more of the anti landlord posturing used by politicians to shift the blame for government actions and inaction onto our industry and make us look like the cause.

Milw Co. Supervisor Marina Dimitrijevic is proposing an ordinance to REQUIRE all landlords to accept Section 8 housing vouchers or any other kind of voucher for rental assistance. This would mean landlords would have to get a property registered under a section 8 program and submit their property for inspections. It would also require you to use one year leases — you could not rent month to month anymore because the Section 8 program mandates one year leases.

Further, it is so loosely drafted that a landlord could not evict a tenant who is behind on the rent if they get an Emergency Assistance check.

This may be coming up for a hearing before the County Economic Development Committee next Monday, March 12, starting at 9:00 AM.

We need people to appear and speak against this. Also, contact your County Supervisor..

The Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors does ordain as follows: Section 1. Chapter 107 of the Milwaukee County Code of General Ordinances is hereby amended as follows:107.01. – Intent.It is the intent of this chapter to render unlawful discrimination in housing and to enact this chapter pursuant to the authority granted to counties by s. 66.432(2) 66.1011, Wis. Stats. It is the declared policy of the county that all persons shall have an equal opportunity for housing regardless of sex, race, color, disability, religion, creed, national origin or ancestry, marital status of a person maintaining a household, lawful source of income, receipt of rental or housing assistance, age, sexual orientation, as defined in s. 111.32(13m), Wis. Stats., status as a victim of domestic abuse, sexual assault, or stalking, gender identity and gender expression, or status in a domestic partnership.107.02. – Definitions.(9) “Receipt of rental or housing assistance” means the receipt of any form of financialcontribution from a third party for the purposes of creating or keeping affordable housing for tenants, purchasers, or other potential housing recipients, including but not limited to, assistance provided pursuant to Title 42, United States Code, section 1437f (commonly known as the “Section 8” housing program), the HOME Partnership Program, the Community Development Block Grant program, or any other public or private rental assistance vouchers or programs.Section 2.The provisions of this Ordinance shall become effective upon passage and publication.

Attorney Tristan Pettit, you know, the guy that writes the standard legal forms for Wisconsin Legal Blank, is doing his landlord-tenant Boot Camp again on Saturday, October 7th. There are still a few seats left.

You get a full day of landlord-tenant law training for the price you’ll spend for 30 minutes of attorney time after you make a mistake in this complex area of law,

All the details are at:
http://www.landlordbootcamp2017.com

But the proof of value is I send my staff to Tristan’s Boot Camps. Even though I know the laws, it is of great value to have staff learn what they need to be concerned about in a different setting than the office.

Seattle tries to make this a landlord issue, ‘How dare landlords prohibit criminals from renting. These good people paid the price for their crime and should be free to live anywhere they want after being released from prison!‘ And Seattle’s landlords fell into this political trap, opposing the ordinance from a concerned landlords’ perspective, rather than what it really is – an assault on the rights of the vast majority of Seattleans that are not criminals.

Let’s step back and look at this situation truthfully.

Landlords screen for criminal backgrounds not for their benefit, but rather do so mostly out of concern for the safety and tranquility of their other tenants and neighbors. The selfish motivation of the owners, if you want to call it that, is crime devalues neighborhoods. But that motivation is beneficial to all in the neighborhood as well as the city itself.

Reduce owners civil liability for the bad acts of their tenants. Jimmie ‘the Hacksaw’ Smythe from 201 rapes and murders Ms. Jones in Apt 310. ‘Don’t blame me. I could not screen for his previous twenty years of criminal activities. In fact feel sorry for me, I now have two vacancies.”

Likewise, owners will no longer be accountable to the municipality for disruptive tenants. ‘Hey, I just rented to the people you told me I had to take.’

The motivation behind screening out criminals was to make neighborhoods more stable and more desirable, thereby benefiting the municipality, the residents, and ultimately the property owners.

This screening prohibition is just another case of failed liberal governments harming the very people they purport to help and support.

Sadly, when this ordinance fails, and it will fail, rental owners will face criticism for the increase in crime happening to Seattle’s more affordable neighborhoods. This time the landlords will be blamed for allowing the very criminals into their units that they were required to under this new ordinance.

The Milwaukee County Board is considering a proposal that would permit your tenants to abate rent for maintenance issues not addressed within 24 hours.

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For example, your tenant calls on Friday morning to say the bathroom faucet is not working correctly. You go out and fix it on Sunday, 50 hours after the call came in. This proposal would allow that tenant to deduct $200 from the rent – Yes! Under this proposal, the tenant can deduct TWO HUNDRED dollars even though you made a timely repair of a minor item that does not affect health or safety.

There will be a hearing on this proposal at 9:00 AM Monday, July 17th, 2017 at the County Board Committee Hearing Room at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, 901 North 9th Street, RM 201B, Milwaukee, WI 53233 Phone: 414-278-4222. Ironically this is two floors below the eviction courtroom where the legitimacy of each deduction will be decided.

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I encourage you to attend. If you cannot attend you can still make an impact by reaching out to your County Supervisor and/or County Executive Chris Abele to let them know the potential negative impact of this proposal on both you as the property owner and on your tenants. If you live in one of their districts please make an extra effort to contact your supervisor and attend. Constituents of the supervisors make a bigger impact when in attendance.

Here are some talking points to help you get started when making your call.

How is maintenance even directly related to evictions?

Who will be responsible for verifying maintenance issues? At what cost? In what time frame?

What is the plan if the issues are deemed inaccurate?

Cost of these abatements and the court costs to fight them will be passed on to good tenants

There is a risk of tenants seeing these types of abatements as a means to avoid paying legitimate rent.

This proposed system is just another layer of cost to the city

There are already programs in place to protect tenants through the Department of Neighborhood Services (DNS). Why add this? If the current system is not working, why not improve what we have rather than create a new layer of bureaucracy and cost.

Evictions are not a result of non-repair, but a result of non-payment

This proposal will increase evictions, not decrease them.

Many of the tenants featured in the news surrounding the Eviction Defense Project (Milwaukee) are serial evictees. This type of evictee increases the rents of good tenants; repeated court costs, employee time, and loss of rent will cause rents to rise.

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There are bigger issues to be addressed regarding evictions in Milwaukee. We need to be looking at ways for landlords to be better landlords and tenants to be better tenants. Many want to blame housing for all the problems in our communities. A better approach for both housing and for the tenants that find themselves in eviction would be to look at the underlying cause of the tenant’s failure to pay rent and have both financial assistance and social intervention to make their future tenancies successful. Housing isn’t the problem, it’s part of the solution. The money would be better spent on education, neighborhood programs, and increased police protection.

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The AASEW applauds efforts to reduce evictions as they are time-consuming and costly for the owners as well as negatively impacting the housing stock and the tenants.

Take action today; contact your supervisor or attend the meeting on Monday (7/17/17).

For the past couple of years, we have sold out both the spring and fall sessions of Attorney Tristan Pettit’s AASEW Landlord Tenant Law Boot Camp.

It looks like we are on track to do the same for the upcoming February 18th, 2017 Boot Camp.

Last fall I waited too long to sign up my new staff members and could not get them in. I signed up three staff people very early for this one. 😉

You may ask ‘Why would Tim pay $537 plus wages to send three people to Boot Camp when he knows the laws so well?’

The answer is easy: One small mistake or missed opportunity will cost us far more than this. It is important that my folks know the law as WI landlord Tenant Law is not always what a reasonable person would assume it to be. And this is ever evolving, with both new laws, new interpretations by courts and new tricks by tenant advocates*. This is not the first time we’ve sent staff either.

This course is presented by Attorney Tristan Pettit. Tristan’s law practice focuses on landlord-tenant law, he is a current board member of the Apartment Association as well as former president, and drumroll please, he writes all the standard landlord tenant forms for Wisconsin Legal Blank.

If you want to go, now that my seats are secure ;-), you can sign up online or call Joy at the Association 414-276-7378 and reserve a spot.

http://www.landlordbootcamp2017.com

* Most “tenant advocates” only advocate for tenants that break the rules. This ultimately costs the rest of the good tenants more in increased rents and decreased service or more noise and disruption… but this is another story for another day.

Disclaimer

I am "just a landlord," NOT an attorney or accountant. If you need legal advice, tax advice or have appendicitis, don’t rely on something you read on the internet and do it yourself. Rather, hire a competent professional.